Last week we went through how Content Marketing will evolve in 2014 and the way our businesses must be prepared. Today I go deeper in other two big trends you'll have to watch out next year... Because Social Media and Big Data will unify

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Nov 2013

Let’s go straight away to the next two big trends in Digital Marketing in 2014: Social Media and Big Data. As I said in the previous post “The Future of Digital Marketing”, all fields tend to unify, but specially the two I’m talking about along this post.

It’s not new social media are nowadays part of our daily life. Figures don’t lie and are impressive indeed: Over this year Facebook has grown up to more than 1.1 billion active users. Over 800 million use it via mobile. Twitter’s growth has been also very quick: we tweet every minute over 17,000 tweets (source: Vocus)

2. Social Media

“The more marketing can integrate social and digital into what they’re doing, the better” (Stephanie Agresta, global director of social media and digital for MSLGroup, as quoted in Vocus). Now, we’re talking.

Launching social media campaigns independently has been the usual proceed of businesses as for today. From 2014 onwards the goal will be to integrate those within the rest of the actions of your company. This is nothing hard to achieve, to be honest. If you have been campaigning on social media for a while, you’re probably already doing so. It’s the natural movement you’ve done when cross-promote posts across social networks, add social buttons to your site, include your profile’s urls to your business cards or just cover your events through social networks.

Some “mini-trends” out of social media will get bigger importance along 2014, such as Influencers Marketing, based on the awareness they can drive to your business. In order to find those influencers (social media users with a big fanbase) you can use LinkedIn better than any other tool to calculate the influence rate.

Take good care of Social Media from now onwards because it will be the key to follow the next big trend in 2014: Client’s data collection to drive your business decisions (Big Data)

Did you know that according to SINTEF 90% out of all data in the entire world has been gathered over the last two years through your online search? Impressive figure, uh? Next year there will be no way to walk away from this practice, even you, small business!

3. Big Data

“Companies in the top third of their industry in the use of data-driven decision making were, on average, 5% more productive and 60% more profitable than their competitors”, according to research by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT, as quoted in Vocus.

When talking about “collecting data” we refer to those customer’s buying behaviours as well as their details like age, gender, where they live… Those features will help us to segment audiences of our marketing activities, make them more accurate. But also it will lead us on our business decision. Audience want products and services that fit their necessities. The goal in 2014 will be to predict the kind of information, activities or products your different audiences want to consume online.

And probably you wonder how your small business can collect such an amount of data, right? In a previous article – How a small business can get the most out of Big Data – I talked about how you can get the most out of this trend. Just a few small actions can give you very good results. You won’t have to spend part of your budget in complex tools, just have a look at the data that Google Analytics!

2014 will be the year you’ll have to start mastering Big Data in order to improve your business and also to know what and who exactly you should include in your next Marketing strategy.

Stay tune to know more about the 2014 trends on Digital Marketing! Next week: Real Time Marketing and Customer experience.

Your turn! Let me know how you’ll be including these trends within your strategies. I really hope you found this article of your interest!

Also, I invite you to follow the latest trends and info about social media via our Twitter or Google+ accounts, find new pictures and infographics on Pinterest or join our interesting conversations with other specialists on the fanpage and LinkedIn Group. I’ll be waiting for you!

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